On Friday afternoon, I attended a planning meeting for the upcoming MnSCU English Discipline Workshop (April 3-4, 2009). Although we had a detailed agenda and superb attendance, we didn't get even a third of the way through the agenda before people started leaving: mainly because we'd reached the scheduled ending point of the meeting, 90 minutes after it'd begun.
Oddly, the person in charge of this workshop, who'd created the agenda, doesn't seem to have *any* grasp of time, of prioritization, of audience. S/he spent an unnecessary amount of time on minutiae, which gave random others the opportunity to chime in with additional unnecessary minutiae.
By 5:00, a full two hours after the beginning of the meeting, we were getting to the agenda items that needed committee member input (real decisions, real consequences). Only six of the original eighteen attendees were still present, and most of us had to leave. So we still don't know if the workshop's topics are still the same (how *does* "Assessment" differ from "Accountability" as one member so wisely asked).
Evacuation roots
5 hours ago
2 comments:
I find those kinds of meetings so frustrating!! The fact of the matter is that most of the basic stuff can be handled by e-mail. I think meetings should only be held for discussions, not for communicating information. Oddly enough, we expect our students to do the reading, but we fail to do our e-mail reading... hmmm.
Yep - you are SO RIGHT. The irony, of course, is that the meeting chair supposedly teaches composition, which asserts the primacy of audience and purpose.
Probably not as s/he teaches it: I'd hate to be a student in that classroom where the instructor just drones on and on and on . . . .
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